1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a camera arrangement and method.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A prior art device for producing a panoramic view from a number of cameras exists. This is described in US-A-2006/0125921 and relates to a video conferencing system. This device allows a group of individual co-located cameras to capture different fields of view of a scene. The images captured by these co-located cameras are then “stitched” together to form a panoramic image. In US-A-2006/0125921, the panoramic image is generated by warping and stitching together quadrilateral portions of the images from each camera.
Further, it is described in US-A-2006/0125921 that a section of the composite image can be extracted and displayed.
However, such a prior art device has very limited capabilities. For example, the device in US-A-2006/0125921 is only suitable for low resolution panoramic images. This is because the techniques for extracting sections of the panoramic image described in US-A-2006/0125921 will result in distortion to the extracted sections.
Additionally, with such a prior art device having low resolution panoramic images, the resolution of the extracted sections will be limited. This means that, with the ever increasing number of high definition devices being used by consumers, the use of the system in the prior art is particularly limited.